UTSA Receives $2.7M Grant for Research

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The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) has received a $2.7 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation to support research into the origin of non-genetic hereditary diseases. The grant will fund research led by John McCarrey, co-director of the UTSA Institute of Regenerative Medicine and a professor in the UTSA Department of Neuroscience, Developmental, and Regenerative Biology.

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McCarrey’s team is investigating how environmentally induced diseases originate through disruptions in epigenetic programming. Specifically, they are exploring how epimutations—heritable changes in gene expression resulting from environmental exposures to compounds such as endocrine disrupting chemicals—are introduced into the epigenome and persist over multiple generations.

According to McCarrey, “Normally, in every generation, we take the epigenetic information that we inherit from the sperm and the egg into the embryo, and we erase a bunch of it and reset it to kind of make it new again. That normally should take care of any problems we inherited from our parents or our ancestors, but somehow these defects are getting through.

McCarrey emphasised the importance of understanding this process at the molecular level. “We haven’t been able to understand that very well at the molecular level. That’s the kind of thing we want to be able to get at in a cell-culture-based approach, where we can have much more precision.”

The research aims to shed light on the mechanisms underlying non-genetic hereditary diseases, which are linked to exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals. These diseases include breast cancer, brain disorders, infertility, kidney or prostate disease, and metabolic diseases.

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